Great Red Spot, JUPITER -- The credit rating of Planet Earth has officially been downgraded to rest on a par with that of Venus. Mr. Helios Eclipse, President of Solar System Securities, confirmed that the solar investment community had come to regard Earth as an "economic basket case."

Credit default swaps for Earth debt, which are a good measure of a solar system market's confidence, have jumped 287 basis points in the last month.

The triangular Mr. Eclipse said earthbound nations are "borrowing to pay current expenses, and their neighbors are borrowing to give them bailouts." He conceded that, "Everyone knows that, when weaning an alcoholic off the bottle, you sometimes need to give him a wee nip just to fight off the shakes." However, he said that, for Earth to continue as a viable planet, it would have to "sell off the Moon" to repay its debts. If it doesn't, there would an economic crunch and the Earth would spin off into deep space.

Mr. Eclipse made these remarks at the Giant Red Spot economic conference on Jupiter, attended by representatives from all the planets except Pluto, which had been reduced to planetoid junk status in 2006 after masquerading as one of the Solar System's "Big Nine" since 1930. He defended his company's decision to downgrade Earth's rating and warned that, if the Earth wasn't careful, it would join fellow planetary deadbeat Mercury in a fiscal rehabilitation plan. As leverage to induce Earth to cooperate with the restructuring, Mr. Eclipse said that free sunshine from the Sun might be withheld.

"It's sad for Earth to be downgraded," said Mr. Eclipse. "But it is a step that we at Solar System Securities had to take after the recent astronomical crisis which saw Mercury and Venus spend too much money on sunshine and carbon dioxide. Earth is, in our view, is going in the same direction and needs to cut back on everything. We have suggested that one cut should be the population of humans on that planet. Our economic specialists suggest it could be reduced to about 5,000 people and 6 cats to make Earth economically viable in the future."

The decision by Solar System Securities was supported by Jupiter's top economists, who have long argued that as the largest planet in the Solar System, it should be the economic leader. Other economists have suggested that Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune were simply tiny rocks surrounded by a balloon of noxious gases and lacked true gravity (or "gravitas") to make these economic predictions. But other business forecasters on Earth have agreed with the downgrading.

"The people of Earth have long been living beyond their means," said semi-retired businessman Warren Buffet. "Now is the time for real savings to be made. I know it will be hard to wipe out 99.9% of the world's population but remember, this is exactly what God did in the last great economic crisis. Then it was Noah who chose wisely to go into shipbuilding. I advise everyone who has access to a dockyard to follow suit."